2014 Lexus ES300h — a hybrid in the luxury car field.

It’s the eternal question in the car-buying world: spend more on a hybrid and only realize the savings in fuel costs years later, or buy the gasoline-only version and save a few thousand dollars now, but get worse mileage figures. Suffice to say that hybrids are a small slice of the overall auto market (around four percent in the U.S.), but they do have their place.

In fact, that place today is occupied by the Lexus version in the midsize luxury field, the 2014 ES300h, the hybrid variant on the venerable ES350. Indeed, the two cars are virtually the same, except the hybrid combines a four-cylinder gas engine with an electric motor and the ES350 uses a V6 gasoline-powered engine.

Which to buy?

First, you have to consider the ES class of cars and whether that’s what you want. (Full disclosure: I once owned a 2002 ES300 and it worked fine. Drove it across the U.S. and it didn’t break and the A/C kept working in 110-degree-plus desert heat.) Lexus makes comfortable cars that are sprung relatively softly and the interior swaddles you in a coupla cows’ worth of leather and various bits and pieces of wood from the vast Lexus forest. The cars are meant to be limo-soft, it seems, and they are. This is the chief rap against them, particularly from the driver who wants that sporty ride that you can get in spades from the German troika (Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz) and from Cadillac’s go-fast-sedan series. No matter. Lexus, the luxo child born to Toyota in the 1990 model year, has achieved a unique level of success in America because, unlike some of the aforementioned sports sedans, Lexi, simply put, appear to have fewer problems in the long run.

The ES300h we had for a week’s test started life at $39,350 and then added enough optional packages to bring the total price to $48,542. That’s nearly $10,000 added on to a car that already has plenty of coddling features. Consider some of the extras installed on our tester: $2,625 for the navigation system with backup camera and DVD/CD player. “Ultra Luxury Package,” at $2,435, gave us the bamboo trim, memory and heated/ventilated front seats, sunshades for the rear half of the passenger compartment and “ambient lighting.”

It’s about this time that I think of the ad Nissan used to have for their no-nonsense SUV, the Xterra: “Everything you need; nothing you don’t.” Kudos to the copy writer who thought that one up.

But clearly there are people who want all these luxo trappings or else the car makers would only offer them sparingly. No, these pricey items are more the rule than the exception. And once you’re in the ES300h (or an Audi A6, or a BMW 5-series, or a Mercedes E-class) you get used to it. We all can get used to pampering. It’s a human trait.

Pampered as we were, we found the ES300h to do just fine on the rural roads of New England. Despite the relative softness of the suspension (although you can switch to Sport mode for a frisson of taut ride), and the occasionally sluggish feel of the continuously variable transmission (Car and Drive calls it “continuously vapid”), it handled well, did not get out of sorts (or off the road) and there was enough power (200 horses’ worth) to keep us on time for appointments. Fuel mileage averaged about 38 – the EPA figures are 40/39 mpg, city/highway. It’s kind of comforting to see that digital readout showing that with a full tank you have a range of nearly 600 miles. (Try that, Tesla.)

Let’s get back to the question of whether it’s worth the extra money for the hybrid. This car’s obvious direct competitor is the ES350, from the same Lexus stable. Its mileage figures are 21/31 mpg, city/highway, so it falls down on the city cycle, but is not that far below the ES300h’s highway figure (a little over 30 percent, if my rudimentary math is correct.) But the ES350 beats the ES300h handily in the horsepower race, with 268 horses on tap from its 3.5-liter V6 engine. And its base price is about $2,700 less than the ES300h. (Then again, there’s the ringer over there, in left field, the Toyota Avalon Hybrid, very similar to the ES300h, but it starts at some $3,500 less.)

There are, of course, competitors – Infiniti Q50 hybrid, Honda Accord hybrid, among others – and even though hybrids only constitute a small fraction of auto sales in the U.S., they are certainly not going away. Toyota clearly has a leg up on everyone else, with the Prius being by far the best-selling hybrid in the world. And the ES300h now makes up an astounding 25 percent of Lexus sales in the ES class, no small achievement.